Experts say quick compressions get oxygen to the brain sooner, which can help a person survive cardiac arrest. “And if you don’t know CPR and you haven’t taken a class, then we just recommend hands-only CPR or compression-only CPR”.
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People should continue to jump in quickly to give CPR, using breaths if they’ve been trained in CPR and employing mobile technology to speed up the rescue of cardiac arrest victims, according to the American Heart Association’s 2015 Guidelines Update for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and Emergency Cardiovascular Care (ECC). Numerous studies on the effectiveness of resuscitation procedures have been reviewed for the new 2015 ERC Guidelines. Those studies producing convincing scientific evidence or emphasising simplification were particularly likely to be implemented. The ERC Guidelines 2015 include detailed instructions to members of the public who may be in a position to save a life by providing bystander CPR to a victim of cardiac arrest. That is why the American Heart Association is urging more teamwork in learning CPR to save more lives.
For the general public, the guidelines reinforce the concept of good, better, best. Currently, less than 10% of these survive to leave hospital.
The new 2015 CPR Guidelines from the European Resuscitation Council (ERC) will help to reach this goal. The reason that it’s becoming more prominent is that we know most victims of cardiac arrest actually don’t receive any CPR.
SE: How does hands-only technique compare to conventional CPR including mouth-to-mouth?
The rescuer pushes hard and fast in the center of the chest at a rate of 100 to 120 compressions per minute. However, if the bystander is trained in CPR and can perform breaths, he or she should add breaths in a 30:2 compressions-to-breaths ratio. However, chest compressions are most important even without breathing. That the difference between hospitals is very small relative to the difference of whether that person had CPR initiated by a bystander or whether they did not. This is not normal breathing, it’s called agonal breathing and it can be a sign of cardiac arrest, akin to seizure-like activity.
A cardiac arrest happens when the heart stops pumping blood around the body. Defibrillation within 3-5 minutes of collapse can produce survival rates as high as 50-70%. The ERC Guidelines 2015 highlight the critical importance of the interactions between the ambulance dispatcher, the bystander who provides CPR and the timely deployment of an AED. There is a little bit of variation in hospitals when it comes to cardiac arrest.
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“To be in cardiac arrest is the most critically ill human condition”, said Dr. Robert Neumar, chairman of the University of Michigan Health System’s department of emergency medicine and former chairman of the AHA’s Emergency Cardiovascular Care Committee.
